| Subject: Canyon Fires ends |
Author:
Wes
[Edit]
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Date Posted: 21:17:22 02/04/10 Thu
So, with tonight's upload Canyon Fires comes to an end.
I have to be honest and say that this book gave me more trouble than any three other books combined, mostly because I screwed up the initial premise. The original idea was to do a routine Canyon trip, led by Crystal and Scooter, with a bunch of strangers, each with their own issues. As the story would progress, there would be conflicts, friends made, issues worked out, and, well, other stuff.
Then I got the idea of using the wedding trip instead. This torpedoed the idea of it being a bunch of strangers. When I sat down and started writing, each individual or couple seemed to need a lot of backstory, things that people have already read other Dawnwalker books already knew. Eventually the backstory drug the whole thing down, despite two different false starts.
Eventually, after putting the book on the shelf for a while, it struck me that I was starting the book in the wrong place -- it needed to start with Nanci showing up at Canyon Tours broke and hungry. Good idea, although that meant that I had to kill a lot of the story that built up to the start of the trip.
I stalled on it again after a while, when the need for the religious conversion scene became clear. Nanci needed a dose of salts and with Preach, Kevin and to a degree Tanisha as examples it seemed like the motivator that was needed to make some of the changes in her life stick. I really didn't want to write that scene for any number of good reasons, but eventually reasoned that people do get conversions like that, and sometimes they stick -- so whether I agreed with it or not, it was a legitimate thing to write about.
When it came time to get the story ready to post, I read through it, and realized there was still too much backstory. In the course of an afternoon I ripped about 50,000 words out of it wholesale, which made the story move better. I suppose I've written about 300,000 words to get the 135,000 that you have seen. I think it moves better and is more readable now than before I started editing with an ax, so I'm glad I did it, and a lot of people seem to have liked the story.
In order to do the story, I also had to fuzz a few things -- the biggest one of which is that we'd already made this trip once in Blue Beauty, so I had to downplay Myleigh in the middle part of the story, in fact, for much of the story, but there was no point in telling that part of the story twice.
Complicated? Yeah. I wish now I'd stuck with the original idea, but what's done is done. Maybe. The as yet unnamed "Dawnwalker 9" is kicking around in my mind and that might be one way to do it . . . or maybe not. We'll all have to wait and see.
For now, "Square One" starts Monday. It's a very different book. The blurb for it goes, "After Danny Evachevski found his wife cheating on him, he had no choice but to get a divorce, go repair ties with his family and friends and start over. It wouldn't break his heart to leave a life and a job he detested, either. It isn't easy to go back home -- things have changed, and changed a lot in the twelve years he's been gone. In spite of family and friends, he's lonely and often seems at loose ends while he watches people that have made something of their lives. Then, quite unexpectedly, things change. Maybe there's hope for him after all!"
-- Wes
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